Ricci Maria Luisa
National Health Institute, Rome, Italy
Dr. Maria Luisa Ricci is a senior researcher at the National Health Institute, Rome, Italy.
She is the director of the National Reference Laboratory for Legionella and has been appointed by the Ministry of Health as an expert for the diagnosis, surveillance and control of Legionella in Italy. She is Legionella laboratory expert for the European Legionnaires’ Disease Surveillance Network (ELDSNET) at ECDC. She is a member of ELDSNET Coordination Committee and member of the ESGLI (ESCMID Study Group for Legionella Infections) Executive Committee. She has been mainly working on Legionella in the areas of diagnosis and typing of environmental and clinical samples and outbreaks investigation. She was principal investigator of a project funded by the MOH for detection of Legionella by molecular methods (qPCR, vPCR), and other projects at regional level to evaluate the efficacy of disinfection treatments against Legionella by both in vitro assays and in situ conditions. She is co-author of Italian and European guidelines for Legionella and of several papers on Legionnaires' disease. She won the 2014 ESGLI prize for the best research proposal on microbiome analysis of drinking water systems.